MSI Radeon HD 3650 Graphics Card Review. Page 6

ATI Radeon graphics card family has recently acquired a new member: ATI Radeon HD 3650. Todayw e will discuss one of the solutions based on this chip - MSI R3650-T2D512-OC – and will fid out if it is worthy representative of the ATI Radeon HD 3000 family that can offer new performance level in the Sub-$100 price range.

Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters

Battlefield 2142

This game doesn’t support display resolutions of 16:10 format, so we use a resolution of 1920x1440 pixels (4:3 format) instead of 1920x1200 for it.

Alas, the accelerated version of ATI Radeon HD 3650 from MSI cannot boast high performance. It cannot deliver an acceptable speed at any resolution in Battlefield 2142, which is not a demanding application by today’s standards. The new card is inferior to previous-generation solutions of the same class, ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 and Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS. Its low price is the only justification. The R3650-T2D512-OC is obviously not meant for serious gaming.

BioShock

BioShock doesn’t support FSAA when running in Windows Vista’s DirectX 10 environment. That’s why we benchmarked the cards without FSAA.

The MSI card is not far behind the Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4, probably because there is no FSAA. Still, the speed of the Radeon HD 3650 is low for playing BioShock at the highest graphics quality settings. You’ll need a better solution with a 256-bit memory bus and at least 16 TMUs, e.g. the Radeon HD 3850.